Ideas

Spending Money for Travel

One, two, three…ten thousand, fifteen thousand, sixty thousand.

What am I counting? I’m counting up my airline miles. I was admiring all of my airline miles in a few different affinity accounts while logged in to my Points.com account and discovered something interesting and annoying.

(Points.com, for those of you who don’t know, is a site where you can exchange points in various affinity programs that normally wouldn’t let you exchange points. For example, I can exchange points from a gas station program into an airline’s program and vice versa. Not every program is a member of Points.com, but there’s a pretty good list of ones that are.)

I’ve got over 20,000 points in Delta’s SkyMiles that I earned when it was Northwest Airlines, and living in Canada it would be quite hard for me to use the points as I don’t fly to the States all that often. While SkyMiles is a member of Points.com, annoyingly they don’t allow swaps out of the program, so I can’t actually use the points other than to fly on Delta. *sigh*

BUT, Points.com has a new program where you can trade points rather than swap (trade usually costs money, while swapping doesn’t). This would allow me to swap out my SkyMiles into something that I would use, like Air Canada’s Aeroplan points. My basic question to you is this: do I spend the money to trade out the SkyMiles?

Here’s the more detailed question:

• Trading out 15,000 SkyMiles would net me 5,000 Aeroplan points and cost me US$140.
• Buying 7,000 SkyMiles to top up to 30,000 would cost me about US $200, THEN I could trade 30,000 SkyMiles for 15,000 Aeroplan points for US$220.

Option 1 would cost me US$140, while Option 2 would cost me almost US$500. Considering the Canadian dollar is almost at par right now with the US dollar, it’s not as bad a cost as it would have been last year. But do I do it? I’m quite tempted to do so because I will never use those SkyMiles to fly Delta, but transferring them over to Aeroplan would mean I could use them, either to fly or to exchange into a gift card or something.

What do you think? Should I go for it? If yes, which option should I choose?

Getting Some Professional Help

As we’re in full-on RRSP mode here in Canada (you can still make contributions to your RRSP now and have it apply to your 2009 tax year), we’re getting bombarded by ads for financial advisers and such. I usually ignore all of these, however this year I’ve been paying a little closer attention as I was thinking of meeting with a financial adviser to go over my situation and see if there was anything I could be doing better (aside from paying off my debt, natch). One of my colleagues had recommended her financial adviser, and I did send him an email last month asking for a meeting, but he never got back to me, so I figured he was too busy. His ears must have been burning this week though as he finally got back to me, and so we set up a meeting for next week to go over things.

I’m excited about meeting with him as I’ve a number of things I’d like to discuss:

• my current debtload
• my RRSP situation

This adviser works for my current employer (remember, I work for a bank), so I’m interested to see what type of things he can come up with. I was so excited and interested to hear what he had to say that I actually showed up to the appointment a week early! (I input the date incorrectly in my calendar, so I showed up this past Thursday when the appointment’s actually NEXT Thursday.) But he was quite gracious and we had a quick chat about things while I was there. I did offer to just come back on my actual appointment day, but he said it was actually good that I was there early as he’d be able to crunch through numbers and have some good suggestions for our appointment next week. (I had brought the latest copies of all my statements with me.)

The  major thing he pointed out quickly was that as my car lease is up next year and I want to keep the car, we’ll have to figure out what to do with the lease buy out amount. Count 1 point for him, as I’d not really been thinking about this. What I’d ask him to figure out was this: Determine the best course of action for me so that I could pay off my debt as quickly as possible without severely curtailing my life, and save me money by consolidating the debt to one payment with a lower interest rate.

So while I’m pretty good at figuring out my finances, sometimes you do need to ask for professional help. Right now I’m plain tired of dealing with this on my own, so let’s see what Mr. Adviser can do for me. Stay tuned!

Edit: Had to postpone the appointment till next week as I came down with a nasty cold this week and couldn’t make the appointment. But I’ll let you know what he has to say!

Are You Making Any Resolutions This Year?

With the impending arrival of 2010 comes the expectation of resolutions. Normally I don’t make any, however I think I might make a few small ones this time around. Aiming small means that I’ll have a better shot at accomplishing them, at least that’s what I hear.

So with no further ado, here’s my list: 1-Put aside $100 into my RRSP each month. 2-Put $100 extra each month towards my debt repayment. 3-Exercise twice a week.

And you, dear readers, are you making any new year’s resolutions? Let me know in the comments.

Good luck everyone, and Happy New Year!

New Ideas to Make More Money

As we’re now a full week into November I was pondering a thought: do I get myself a part-time job to make some extra money? Stores tend to hire more holiday staff to help out during the holidays, and even with the economy being what it is, I’ve noticed stores have already put up their signs looking for new staff. Seeing how my additional income streams and snowflakes are at a trickle or are non-existant, I was thinking about this idea this week. Working a part time job would bring in regular money, and since it would be part time (read: in the evenings and weekends), it shouldn’t be too stressful for me (I would get a job close to my home, so the commute wouldn’t be so bad).

The negative things about getting the part time job are that:

1. I would definitely be more tired than I already am. My f/t job, while not stressful physically, is quite mentally taxing, as I do spend a lot of time thinking (who knew thinking that much would be so tiring!) So the additional time working p/t would definitely add to the fatigue.
2. Working at a store during the holiday season increases my chances of not being able to go out of town for Xmas like I usually do, since I suspect I’d be roped into working on Boxing Day.

So, what do you think dear readers? Should I bite the bullet and give it a shot? Or should I put more effort into my currrent snowflaking & money making efforts that I can do from home, and try to increase my income that way?